Of the five primary performers during the Grammys gay-marriage extravaganza last night, three—Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Madonna—count as gay allies. (They're all more or less openly heterosexual.) One—Mary Lambert—is an actual, open homosexual. And the last—Queen Latifah—is... well, we all know what she is. She just won't say it.
We already know that there are several things that Patti LaBelle does not give a fuck about. The latest entry in what is destined to be an overflowing file as age ripens Ms. LaBelle into the greatest crabby old lady pop culture has ever witnessed is the label of "diva." In a terrific interview for PrideSource, the 69-year-old living legend gave writer Chris Azzopardi an earful of thoughts about the watering down of a word she clearly once considered to be a big compliment:
Yesterday, Esquire's culture blog posted a review of the new HBO show that is just like your life or your friend's life or the life of that guy in your office whose shoes are always just a little nicer than they have to be, Looking. In "A Straight Man's Guide to HBO's Looking," writer Mick Stingley determines that the show about a handful of weed-paced gay friends in San Francisco "commits the heinous sin of being gay and boring." Stingley's bio that follows his piece states that he "loves Tom Wolfe and rock and roll and lives with his fiancée in Queens." He seems to have a lot in common with those gay guys on the show with the exception of the gay thing. Boring is the universal human experience.
In case you missed it, Lifetime (television for women and their friends who love campy shit) aired a brand new version of V.C. Andrews' incest classic Flowers in the Attic on Saturday. Its ridiculous plot, which finds a group of four young siblings imprisoned in their grandparents' attic because their grandfather can't know about them because their mother married her half-uncle and their mother is trying to win back the love of her father so she can inherit his fortune, was delivered ridiculously. (Spoiler alert: The imprisoned brother and sister end up fucking, so that kind of thing runs in the family.)
Republican strategist Mary Matalin appeared on last night's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher to discuss the book she wrote with her Democrat husband James Carville, Love & War: Twenty Years, Three Presidents, Two Daughters and One Louisiana Home. (Carville also appeared on the Real Time panel.) When she sat down next to Maher, he remarked, "I know you're very brave because you had a fall and you had a little medical problem and you still showed up." Matalin proved to be more than just brave—she seemed hopped up on something that made her speech sluggish and slurred. She brought the party.
TLC's Here Comes Honey Boo Boo returned for a third season last night. Where does the time go? It seems like only yesterday that concerned TV viewers were losing their shit over these people who can't seem to keep theirs (or anything else up their asses) in. Now, the Honey Boo Boo family seems just kind of...normal.
It's not easy being a TV show about gay men in 2014. Thanks in part to the power of the internet as a platform for activism and outrage, the responsibilities of representation have never seemed more urgent, or more complicated. To appeal to your gay audience—built-in and notoriously loyal—you need to be realistic. To appeal to everyone else—whose patronage will ultimately make or break—you can't be too gay. The ideal is something satisfying without the ick factor, something like, and about as likely as, a spontaneous orgasm.
Even for a My Strange Addiction enthusiast like myself, this segment was hard to swallow (I just don't buy the dirty diapers that this woman is selling, nor would I ever!). But I'm glad Jezebel covered it because it cracked me up in the same way, I suppose, professional wrestling energizes its more aware enthusiasts. Quite possibly the most absurd thing I've ever seen on television.
Here's a great lede: "Kanye West just attacked an 18-year-old guy inside the waiting room of a chiropractor's office..." Of course he did.
Robert/Sherry from last week's sensational UK documentary Secrets of the Living Dolls was interviewed on the UK chat show This Morning. In case you need a refresher, the doc focused on a subculture of men who don rubber suits and masks, giving them the appearance of walking sex dolls. The 10-minute interview was as splendidly awkward as you'd expect.
The Westboro Baptist Church has at last found its medium. The hate group's over-the-top brand of expressing bigotry for basically anyone who isn't them, it turns out, is perfectly suited for the cut-heavy, silliness-fueled, 6-second world of Vining. It's like they've been an avant garde art project this whole time and only now can they fully express it.
"Distract your subject with hardcore lesbian sex happening right next to him" doesn't seem like a viable interview strategy, but then 2 Live Crew mastermind Luther Campbell is no ordinary interviewer. The, uh, chat above happened in 1997, around the time of the release of Jay's second album, In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. The rapper/mogul pair attempt to discuss Jay Z's music, but that proves impossible, which is the point, I guess? If everyone had two women hooking up next to them, no one would get any work done.
Last night, IFC premiered the three-hour miniseries spoof The Spoils of Babylon. Starring the likes of Tobey Maguire, Kristen Wiig, Tim Robbins, Will Ferrell, and Carey Mulligan (voicing a mannequin love interest), it's one of those bits of pop culture that owes debt to a lot of things while being not quite like anything that ever existed. Created by SNL writers Matt Piedmont and Andrew Steele (and directed by the former), it exists to skewer the epic, multi-night network melodramas of the '70s and '80s (a la The Thorn Birds), which makes it the spiritual cousin of other high-concept retro spoofs that take on the format they're affectionately parodying. What Strangers With Candy was to ABC Afterschool Specials, what Grindhouse was to grindhouse schlock, what Far from Heaven was to women's pictures of the '40s and '50s, and perhaps what Dredd was to dumb '80s action bloodbaths, The Spoils of Babylon is to the network miniseries.
Meet Lacey Wildd, a 45-year-old mother of six, who's had "29, maybe 30" plastic surgery procedures including: 12 breast augmentations, two tummy tucks, three Brazilian butt lifts, illegal silicone in her lips (whatever that means), three full-body lipos, and an internal corset. She was profiled last night on TLC's My Strange Addiction. Of course she was. Highlights (the breast of Wildd, if you will) are above. They include Wildd's "jack-o'-lantern" trick that exposes several boob veins.
Stevie Nicks appeared in a series of Dutch angles on last night's episode of American Horror Story: Coven. Exhibiting a considerable sense of humor about herself, he played a slightly altered version of herself, a singer/songwriter/icon who just happens to be a white witch.
Last night on UK television aired a documentary called Secrets of the Living Dolls, about men who dress up in rubber suits and masks, giving them the appearance of walking sex dolls. "Maskers" mask for a variety of reasons that were mentioned but not exactly explored on this freak-show doc: to be the women that they can't get, to get attention, perhaps sexual reasons. None in the documentary owned up to this last reason, but one of the members of the family that makes of FemSkin body suits, which seems to be the sole supplier of rubber body suits to these guys, told a group of maskers at a convention, "I don't know what you guys shove up those vaginas, but they can't take it, I'm tellin' ya."
Last night, notorious film critic Armond White (dubbed The World's Most Contrarian Film Critic by Time) continued his tradition of howling, transparent public spectacle at the New York Critics Circle Awards. This time, his heckling was aimed at 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. You know how Lady Gaga sings, "I live for the applause"? It's just like that, except the opposite for the troll that is White.
